The Angler bellows “Fish on!” brandishing his harpoon. That legendary barb spilled Kraken blood. Now it seeks a human catch. Arms flex like sea serpents flinging briny nets across this ocean of death. Entrapped, his victims flail like mullet. He tirelessly hauls them in. One giant warrior evades his toss and charges like an angry whale. The Angler ducks his thrashing flukes. His harpoon launches, pegs the beast, who tosses in a sea of blood. Around his feet a knotted hempen rope. Tossed over a beam, he hauls up his catch, guts him, poses. A great picture for the tourists.

Rose left her husband snoring deeply in the covers and palmed her children’s bedroom door before slipping out to meet the pre-dawn glow. No one bothered her as she made her way, her face hidden in her hood. When she reached the colosseum the crowds were buzzing with blood lust. She settled her skirts on the dusty bench, then saw her paramour emerge, saw his sword thrown, his pen drawn, the beasts defeated still. She left to find him, fighting through hands tearing her clothes, scratching her skin. She tripped and shut her eyes against a sea of feet trampling.

The Beast charges. Val curses, leaps, embeds his pen in the beast’s eye. The beast wails. Val sheds a tear, walks to his sword, is swallowed under the beast’s descending body. The beast deflates. Val emerges, bathed in blood. The ground shakes with the crowd’s eruption.

Bucephalus and Incitatus pull the chariot around the arena’s curve toward Quintus’s last opponent, a German gripping a throwing axe. Quintus hears the team’s hooves, their frothy snorts, his own heartbeat. He raises his javelin.

Gesticules loved the arena. Today’s contest had been particularly enjoyable. He had taken his massive hammer and swung it with abandon, allowing it to freely crush his opponents. What fun.

Before him were the hundred hapless corpses of all those who had thought that they might be his better. They were, as always, wrong. And the reward for their mistaken thinking? The tears of those that they once loved.

Gesticules walked to the center of the arena to soak in the roaring cheers of the crowd.